TiVo is now placing ads on the “Now Playing” show lists. I turned a blind eye when the ads started popping up in the main menu, but enough is enough! What’s next? Will they start overlaying ads on the actual shows?
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Do you know that feeling you get when something isn’t right? You know the one, you can’t quite put your finger on it, but something is out of place. I had that feeling tonight. I was sitting on the couch with Lori and Charlie watching the new movie Disney movie “Snow Buddies” when the feeling hit me. I started looking around the room… What was missing?
That’s when I realized that one of the dogs was not in the room with us, Cheyenne was mysteriously absent. Normally she’s in the same room, or getting into some sort of trouble in a different room and we can hear her. I hopped up and went searching, and this is what I found:
This is Cheyenne sound asleep on MY bed. I guess she got tired while eating one of our rolls of toilet paper.
Exhibit A - What’s left of a toilet paper roll.
You can see the guilt on her face. She won’t even look at the evidence!
I think Eko was in on it. He had us distracted.
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Ok, I normally don’t post these things on my blog, but I found this one pretty funny and worth passing on.
Class Project Gone Wrong
An elementary school class started a class project to make planters to take home to their parents.They wanted to have a plant in it that was easy to take care of, so they decided to use cactus plants. The students were given green-ware pottery planters in the shape of clowns which they painted with glaze. The clown planters were professionally fired at a class outing so they could see the process. It was great fun! They planted cactus seeds in the finished planters and they grew nicely, but unfortunately, the children were not allowed to take them home. The cactus plants were removed and small ivy replaced them and the children were then allowed to take them home instead.
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Charlie and I made an Igloo on Friday afternoon. Or at least we tried. Once we were finished it looked a little more like a bee-hive. It was fun though. I’ve never built an igloo or… beehive before.
It’s starting to melt now, and it’s beginning to shift and crack, so it’s getting more unstable everyday. The problem is that when you’re six years old, you just doesn’t realize that going into an igloo that would probably be condemned by the city isn’t safe. It’s hard telling Charlie that he needs to be careful around our snow creation. I guess I’ll just have to make some snow rats and cockroaches all around and slap a condemned sign on it myself.
It was kinda starting to look like a bona fide igloo here.
Umm, not sure where it went wrong, but it went very wrong.
After patching it, we called it done. Looks a little more like a bee-hive.
I dubbed it our little “Ugloo”
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I was talking with Charlie on the phone the other night. The cell phone connection wasn’t very good so he couldn’t understand me very well.
Finally, in a frustrated tone, Charlie tells me:
“Dad, you can just tell me when you get home. I don’t know what you are telling me. You sound all scribbly.”
Scribbly. I love it.
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For the past couple of weeks I’ve been seeing commercials for the NEW Pirates of the Caribbean online game from Disney. The big push in the commercial is that you can play for FREE!
I decided to go ahead and sign Charlie up so he could play it today. I knew there would be a catch with the “play FREE” thing. I know they HAVE to make money somehow, so I wasn’t surprised when I found out they had different levels of play. Basically, the more you pay, the more advanced features you get. The FREE version is a “light” version of the game. No problem, Charlie is only 6, he’s probably just going to walk in circles and hit everything he can find with a sword. It’s not like he’s going to get into the whole Multi-Player/Community facet of the game yet.
After I signed up, downloaded and ran the game I figured out the REAL catch to trying to play the game for FREE. Turns out that if you don’t pay for access, you get thrown into the “FREE BASIC ACCESS QUEUE.” This is the equivalent of being forced to sit at the back of the bus. I’ve been sitting in the Queue for over 2 hours so far staring at the intro screen to the game. My bet is I never see the actual game (maybe if i sign in at 3am!).
How do I know this is the catch? right on the intro screens they put this link:
“Don’t Want to Wait? Upgrade to Unlimited Access”
Personally, I think they should have been a little more honest and used this as their link text:
“Thanks for getting conned by our multi-million dollar ad campaign stating that you can play our fantastic new Pirate Game for FREE. We are glad you appreciate how carefully we crafted our campaign to target your children. Obviously it’s a pretty hollow offer, so now that you have your child begging you to let them play the cool game that they saw on the TV commercial, just suck it up and give us our $9.95 per month. We’ll also be happy to accept a yearly payment for the bargain price of $79.95. Again, thanks for getting sucked into yet another commercial scam!”
I suppose their text is a little shorter.
In short, if you are going to advertise a GAME to KIDS that they can play for FREE, make sure they can really play for FREE. Throwing out bait like this, and then switching to an entirely different setup at the last second just pisses off the consumer - ME.
What is even more upsetting than not getting to play the game as promised, is that this immoral corporate marketing tactic is probably working, and Disney is raking in the cash hand over fist.
But, who would want to listen to what I have to say. After all, I’m just sitting at the back of the bus.
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I love the new K2 Theme for Wordpress.
I have one major annoyance though. The “pages” that you create in wordpress automatically appear as tabs in the header of the website. I REALLY don’t want them there but there is no way to remove them through the admin interface. I’ve searched around quite a bit and the only solution I’ve found to the problem is to edit the PHP code. I found the offensive code and edited it so the “pages” no longer appear as tabs at the top of my website.
Here is the fix I used to knock out the “pages” from the header.
I am running the “K2 Release Candidate 4″ version.
1. Find the header
“wp-content/themes/k2″
2. Towards the bottom of the file you should find this line of code:
<?php wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’); ?>
I have a completely UNMODIFIED version of the theme. This is my first modification. In my header.php file it is on line #137
3. To completely remove the pages from the header all you have to do is comment out the php line by adding two “//” characters right after the beginning of opening php tag. The completed line will look like this:
<?php //wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’); ?>
^^ see the change! 
4. I could have just deleted the entire line but I always like to leave the original code in case I ever need to refer back to it later.
5. Congratulations! You just deleted your “pages” from the header of your site!
Now, you may still want to display your pages somewhere on your site, I did! Here’s what I did so I could still view my pages as a sidebar module.
1. Log into your wordpress admin account and goto the “K2 Sidebar Manager” under the Presentation tab.
2. Add a new module to one of your sidebars using the “Text, HTML, and PHP” module.
3. Add this code to the module:
<ul>
<li>
<?php wp_list_pages(’title_li=’ ); ?>
</li>
</ul>
4. Viola! You now have your “pages” as a sidebar module!
I decided to kill the tab that either says “Register” or “Site Admin” that appears in the header also.
Basically just follow the steps to remove the “Pages” from the header, except you are going to change this line:
<?php wp_register(’<li class=”admintab”>’,'</li>’); ?>
to this:
<?php //wp_register(’<li class=”admintab”>’,'</li>’); ?>
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I slammed the door closed to the Explorer last night.
Somehow I managed to hit myself in the head.
So, essentially I slammed my head in the car door.
Dumb car door.
Oh yeah, it hurt too.
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I headed out to pick up a 32 ounce coke from the gas station tonight. I decided to cut across the freshly snow covered yard to the drivers door of the car. About half way there, I slipped and started windmilling across the yard toward the car door.
The good news? I made it to the car without falling.
The bad news? My slipping and sliding came to a sudden halt when I collided with the car. Once I hit the car, I promptly fell backward and hit the ground. As I hit the ground, I kicked my left leg up under the car slamming my shin into the metal car frame.
Damn that hurt.
I quickly picked myself up and scanned up and down the street. Whew, no body was around to see me in action. I opened the door and jumped in the car. Ignoring the increasing pain in my shin, I slipped the key into the ignition. As the car started I was blown back in my seat by the volume of the radio. Yeah, I had it cranked up listening to some old 80’s classic on the way home earlier.
As my senses adjusted, I realized what song was on the radio: “Catch Me I’m Falling.”
Evidently God really does have a sense of humor.
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Monkeyjack.com is now KeithCramer.com.
At least for now.
Let’s see who can find me!