Star Wars Detours

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I honestly would’ve expected this to be a fan parody, but I guess it’s actually a project that Lucasfilm is working on for 2013. It kinda reminds me of the first parody that the Family Guy folks did a few years ago, before parts 2 and 3 that ended up being terrible in comparison!

Hopefully this won’t be another example of all the best bits being in the trailer, but so far it was pretty funny to me … I especially liked the “origin” Admiral Ackbar’s quote…  😉

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yRNXFhboBI

anti-virus woes…

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So what, pray tell, is Avast actually doing when it’s running in the background on my PC all day and night???

Desktop PC randomly stopped connecting to the Internet, despite device reboots all around, and now an AV scan is throwing up all sorts of matches in various cache files that I kinda feel Avast should’ve been catching earlier! Is it time for me to switch back to AVG or something else, or do I need to be running more than one app yet again to protect my PC from this kind of crap???

It doesn’t take 7-10 days to update a freaking mailing list database!!!

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This always astounds and infuriates me – unless your mailing list consists of rolls of toilet paper stacked away in a room full of filing cabinets, there’s no reason in the world that unsubscribing me from your mailing list – which I never asked to be a member of in the first place – should take up to 10 business days.

Way to ensure that I never order anything online from one of your stores ever again, Sears…  👿

choosing a dog hotel…

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It’s actually not that easy…

(don’t get any ideas – I haven’t, and will never, actually see that movie)

The last time we went on vacation, I’m pretty sure we just used regular, old travel sites and then checked to see if they allowed dogs when we found a few that we liked. We ended up being really happy with our choice … part of it might have been that because it was right around Christmas, the place seemed like it was just about empty, so we didn’t feel at all guilty when Cleo occasionally barked because she thought she’d heard a noise outside the door or something. I’m not sure if we ever even saw anybody else on our floor for the three nights that we were there, so it was kinda nice!

Now we’re getting ready to drive up to Michigan for a couple of weeks of vacation, so we need to find pet-friendly place to crash overnight because 1,385-miles is just way too far to drive in one shot. I found this site – BringFido.com – that seems kinda cool because essentially they’ve compiled lists of only dog-friendly hotels, and you can browse them directly on the map to see what’s within range of a given location or whatever. They also tell you what the particular pet fee is for each one, which I found pretty important because there are definitely some that call themselves pet-friendly, but then end up having such high pet fees that you’d either have to be nuts or rich to actually stay there! For the Christmas trip, we did pick a slightly nicer hotel because it was Christmas and we knew we’d be there for several days, whereas this time we don’t really need anything special – we’ll probably be there less than 12 hours, tops – just long enough to grab some shut-eye after driving for 12 hours straight.

And chances are with a cheaper motel, it’ll be even harder to tell if Cleo accidentally pees on the carpet, so there’s always that, too!  😮

Hey, look – LiveJournal comments!

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Frankly, I’m just as surprised as you are…

I hadn’t exactly given up on getting my comments imported from LiveJournal after migrating the rest of the blog over last fall, but at the same time, it was kind of out of my hands unless I was willing to go under the hood myself…

…which I was actually thinking about doing, even though I really have no idea how that API even works…

…but luckily, I didn’t have to because out of the blue, I saw an update to the import plugin yesterday so I decided to give it another try, and low and behold, it actually started doing stuff when it got to the comment import portion!

Mind you, the importer ran and ran for a long time, which I know that it technically anticipates with a warning at the top for those who have lots of comments (mine allegedly has 802), but apparently part of it was because somehow I ended up importing a ton of duplicates that I later had to go back in and wipe out. Sorry … I didn’t save the exact query, but I used something along the lines of this to weed out the couple of thousand extras that piled up on a handful of posts.

(You also need to refresh the comment count afterwards because that’s actually stored at the post level, fyi…)

So anyways, I’m definitely happy that this is finally completely done … I honestly don’t get a ton of comments or anything, but having migrated everything else over I kinda felt bad that the comment section hadn’t followed with the rest of my earlier posts as originally intended. Now this is truly a full copy of my original blog that I started way back in 2003, so it makes me feel better to know that if LJ eventually does go completely under one day, I’ll still have a snapshot in its entirety of my early years of blogging! 😉

If you’ve been having issues on importing comments from LiveJournal to WordPress for the same reason, it might be worth updating to the latest version of the plugin (0.5, as of now) and giving it another shot. Of course, be sure to backup your database before kicking it off, but I didn’t get any duplication with the posts that I’d already pulled in – just some weirdness with duplicate comments that took maybe an hour or so afterwards to resolve.

Lego Minifigs – series 8!!!

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I actually didn’t even realize that these were out yet, but ended up grabbing a handful of them Saturday evening at Downtown Disney as sort of an impromptu birthday gift to myself!

Not only was I happy to actually have NO DUPS in the five bags that I bought, but I also really like a lot of the figs in this series – Santa, in particular, along with the alien ray gun dude and even Tinkerbell…

Our local Walmart is still on series 7 (when the have any at all), so those might be around a little longer, even though I’ve had really bad luck with dups on those lately. In looking back through other past series, I wish there was a way to fill out my collections of those without just going on BrickLink or eBay to buy them specifically … I’d kind of rather still buy the individual packs if I could, although maybe a few more dups and that ideology will fall to the wayside… 😛

Thin Post : Picking Up the Pieces…

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Where did I even leave off with these things now???

I don’t really have anything more to say – it’s been a busy summer. About a month ago I think I tried to shock myself into getting in gear, but in hindsight that post ended up being a week before we signed the documents to buy our new house, so in retrospect, any notion of kick starting my weight loss and buying a new house and cleaning out our old rental house all at the same time was at best kinda silly and more realistically just plain mad!  🙄

Anyways, thankfully I think that I’m starting to see the light of day again, so I want to also start dabbling in getting things back under control, but I’m not going to kid myself because not only do I still have a lot on my plate (pun unintended), I’ve also got a lot of bad habits that are unfortunately going to take some time to work through here again. I tend to eat when I’m stressed, and I was pretty well stressed throughout the entirety of the month of August, so a few less takeout meals here, a little exercise there – we’ll take this in baby steps!

I don’t know what appropriate goals should be for myself at this point, and I think at this point that’s perfectly ok.

Obviously I’d still love to be feeling better by the cruise, however that’s in just about a month so I want to be realistic, too.

Maybe some progress by October, and then some more by Christmas or something … I don’t know.

Also, I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not, but I already promised myself that I wouldn’t even look at a scale until after we get back from sailing … part of it is frankly that I’m just mortified of seeing the same numbers that I’ve already cleared once before, but I think my driving factor is simply that I really don’t think seeing a number would be any good for me at this point.

I know that I have a ways to go to get back into the swing of things, and so for a while I’m just going to start wandering down that road.

I honestly probably won’t even blog about my efforts again at least for a little while. I’ve got some little ideas here and there, but I think I need to take a step back and sort of re-focus before I try to tackle my weight loss head-on, and if I happen to find something that works even better in the interim, then hey – same goal!

Right now I guess I’m just kind of taking it one day at a time, but I’ll keep you posted. 😉

Stormfront, Meh

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It’s funny how after living someplace for a while, you sorta get complacent about things like the weather when there’s a storm brewing that could potentially blow your recently purchased and hopefully adequately insured new house halfway across town…

😕

It’s kinda crazy to actually sit back and do the math, but I guess I’ve technically been living here in Florida for 9 years now – nearly a third of my life! – so much in the same way that up in Michigan when “the blizzard of all blizzards” was coming in off Lake Michigan and we simply shrugged it off as an excuse to try out our new shovels, now here in the middle of “hurricane season” I find myself not so much scrambling around for canned goods and batteries as do wishing that I’d have taken Cleo out for her walk before it started to torrential downpour that will likely last for the next week and a half!

I honestly don’t think that Isaac is going to have much impact on us here in the Tampa Bay area at all, aside from some rain and wind, anyways.

I will admit that I do find it a little amusing that threat of the storm may upset the Republican National Convention that’s taken over downtown for the next week … hey, at the very least those guys deserve to get a little inconvenienced after the floods of ridiculous bullshit coming from their own mouths that we have to wade through the rest of the year!