I guess when you are going out of business, you get desperate…

I saw this window painting on a now closed Hollywood Video store.

PREPARATION
Season chicken with pepper and salt on both sides.
Heat oil in a medium skillet over medium heat. Add the chicken and cook, turning once or twice and adjusting the heat to prevent burning, until brown and an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thickest part registers 165°F, 12 to 16 minutes. Transfer to a plate and tent with foil to keep warm.
Add shallot to the pan and cook, stirring, until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add mushrooms; cook, stirring occasionally, until tender, about 2 minutes. Pour in vermouth (or wine); simmer until almost evaporated, scraping up any browned bits, about 1 minute. Pour in broth and cook until reduced by half, 1 to 2 minutes. Stir in cream and chives (or scallions); return to a simmer. Return the chicken to the pan, turn to coat with sauce and cook until heated through, about 1 minute.

I took a drive around town, and in the first two hours, I saw 1 car in the ditch, and two cars struggling to get up a hill. Eventually they gave up, put their emergency lights on, and stopped.

Later in the evening, the street in front of my house, a small series of hills, had about 10 assorted cars stopped at various angles. A camry, mini cooper, mini vans, civics, etc..

You think that eventually Portlanders would realize that snow is indeed slippery, and stop trying to drive through it in cars without snow tires or chains. But even that isn’t what irks me. I’ll see a car going 5 miles an hour approaching a hill, and it slows to 2 miles, then 1 mile an hour, and the driver actually believes they’ll make it up the hill…..momentum….

It snows every single year in Portland, yet most people do not seem to understand how to drive in the snow. I really don’t get it.

Both of them suck. At least, if you were expecting to play an RTS in the C&C, Age of Empires, Warcraft sense.

First off, you have zero control. Each game constantly interrupts gameplay by telling you to move to a marker, to engage the target at a second marker, to send artillery to this smoke. You have no control. Each game just tells exactly what to do.

Company of Heroes is the by far the worse. Options to build artillery, barracks, etc.. were all greyed out. You’d literally wait, the screen would shift to a building, a voice would come on and say “click this building, click this button”. Once you did that, the screen would shift again to a location maker, and a voice would say “click here to deploy that other thing I had you click”.

What is the point of playing a Real Time Strategy game, if the game decides exactly what you should do?

And lets talk about how the game chooses to direct you: by taking control of the screen every other minute. That has got to be the most annoying game play “experience” I have ever encountered. Not only are you not allowed to actually make a decision, but literally ever minute the game takes control away from your mouse and keyboard, and moves the screen. It completely breaks any remaining sense of control or immersion.

I suppose that multiplayer is the only true reason those games are popular. I would assume (hope) that a multiplayer match actually allows you to make decisions, place defenses where you want them, and doesn’t interrupt your gameplay every other minute by telling you what to do and taking control of all the keys.

/rant off

Should we consider the Congressional Research Service biased?
Source: http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/R40104_20090227.pdf page 13

Table 1. Zandi’s Estimates of the Multiplier Effect for
Various Policy Proposals
Policy Proposal  One-year change in real GDP for a given policy change per dollar

Recently I ran into a problem that I have not seen before (and this could be due to the complexity of the site I was working on, being too complex for its own good:)).

I had an existing site built mainly in PHP, and wanted to add the ability for the site’s owner to edit the pages using Fckeditor.

After uploading the Fckeditor, the _samples directory had mostly working PHP examples. However, each time I would edit a file, the html and head section would just disappear.

Hitting the “source” button on Fckeditor, revealed that it did not see the or other sections of my code.

After quite a bit of googling, I discovered that I needed to enable full page edits with this fckconfig.js addtion:
FCKConfig.FullPage = true;

In addtion, since some of the files had php code in them, I needed to add:
FCKConfig.ProtectedSource.Add( /<\?[\s\S]*?\?>/g ) ; // PHP style server side code

While I can understand Fckeditor “hiding” html head sections and things like server-side php code, given that it is supposed to be a wysiwyg editor for non-programmers, the major problem is that is LOSES that data.

Fine, if you want to, by default, hide much of the source code of a file, at least do not lose it upon post.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/11/feinstein_stimulus_amendment/

“US Senator Dianne Feinstein hopes to update President Barack Obama’s $838bn economic stimulus package ”

“reasonable network management practices such as deterring unlawful activity, including child pornography and copyright infringement.”

A) Please help to stop the practice of tacking on unrelated additions to bills in the House and Senate. This sort of network neutrality issue has nothing to do with stimulus and you know it.
B) I can fully understand your desire to protect copyright, as well as protect the innocent from indecent material, but you are going about it in a very very dangerous way.
….i. Forcing (Or even allowing) ISPs’ to filter, shape, or otherwise manage their network traffic, will directly conflict with our Nation’s idea of free speech. Allowing an ISP to determine what traffic gets priority on a network, or what traffic gets to be “heard”, is exactly the opposite of the principle of freedom of speech.
….ii. Prioritizing network traffic (or filtering) based on the current desire of an ISP, which amounts to prioritizing/filtering traffic based on that ISP’s largest customers, stifles any chance that startup companies have of gaining significant market share within the internet.

Please consider directing laws towards the root cause of the problems, and not the medium in which they exist. For example, if drug smugglers often use ‘trucks’, making trucks on the highway drive 50% slower, really doesn’t solve the ‘drug problem’. Now imagine if every local road crew had the ability to slow down any car type they wanted, because for them, that car type was bad/wrong in some way some of the time.

That is exactly analogous to any sort of network shaping, filtering or management.

Of course, I could be completely wrong in my understanding of your attempted stimulus package modifications, but how could I attempt to become more informed, when much of these “little details” are worked out behind closed doors.

I know that most Senators feel that “this is just how things get done in Washington” but I beg of you to truly embrace the idea of change that was voted for in the recent Presidential election.

When facts can’t change someone’s mind, should they really be a US senator? Why do these boneheads keep getting elected….