As you may have noticed, posting and commenting has been lax lately. I took a trip to Delosa, Clancy and I went to a water park for a couple of days, and now we’re packing for our big trek to the Pacific Northwest. I have a lot of post ideas waiting in the wings and relatively little time to post them. There will be a steady stream of output (thanks in part to my webmaster), but things wouldn’t be shooting at full blast for a few weeks.

Things I find annoying about the way that Windows names files and moreso how it sorts files:

• It would be extremely helpful to allow question marks in filenames and it’s annoying that it won’t let me. I’d say that it’s actually even more important than periods.
• By default, Windows does not include extensions on filenames. You can change this, though, which is good. Unfortunately, when you show extensions it changes the order in which files sort because the period is sorted after the space. So if you have an MP3 entitled “Troy Thomason – Black Coffee.mp3” and another entitled “Troy Thomason – Black Coffee (live).mp3” the former will appear first if you’re hiding extensions but the latter will appear first if you’re showing them. This comes up more often than you would think. If you have the American Pie movies on your computer, “American Pie 2.mov” will show up before “American Pie.mov” if extensions are not hidden.
• Windows 2000 does not sort numerically. If you have a file named “Test Document 2” and another named “Test Document 10” the latter will appear first in Windows 2000. This actually wasn’t a big deal because I could fix it using filename trickery. So this isn’t a complaint so much, particularly since they fixed it for Windows XP, but it’s kind of annoying that Windows XP and Windows 2000 treat this differently. There are supposed to be ways that you can get Windows XP to stop figuring out numbers, but I want to have my cake and eat it, too. I wish one of the Windows 2000 SP would have addressed this issue. Yes, yes, I know that’s not what SPs are for, but still.
• On the other hand, there are some discrepencies between Windows 2000 and Windows XP that have no logical explanation. The way that non-numeral and non-alphabetic characters are sorted changed. I had found a filename trickery way around previously mentioned problems by sticking certain characters in front of the filenames like !’,-…. but Windows 2000 puts them in a different order than XP, so the order changes depending on what OS I’m using and that’s pretty lame.
• Also lame was Microsoft’s decision to make the dash a non-sorting character for XP. I wanted to add a dash to put certain files ahead of other files because it’s less intrusive to the exclamation point that I had been using (if I wanted a file to appear at the top of the directory, I simply renamed Filename.ext to !Filename.ext).
  Most of these could be fixed if I could go into the registry or some other setting place and change how the files are sorted alphabetically.

Due to the site being down and last week being my last week at work, some of the posts I’d been planning to put up didn’t get posted. They should be going up this week, though, as I put some finishing touches on them.

It’s funny how you would think that being unemployed would make a blogger more prolific, but thus far I seem to have less blogging neurons firing than I did two weeks ago. We’ll see if that changes.

Sorry for the downtime, everybody. Word is that there was a fire at the building that was hosting the site and that the entire building was taken off the power grid.

1. What is your occupation?
I’m a Quality Assurance Analyst testing the software on what is primarily a hardware product.

2. What color are your socks right now?
White. Always white.

3. What are you listening to right now?
A mix collection of MP3s. Stone Temple Pilot’s Big Empty is play right now. I’ll check back in when I complete this and report that song, too. At the end of this quiz, the Eels’s “Dirty Girl” is playing.

4. What was the last thing that you ate?
Half a spicy hamburger.

5. Can you drive a stick shift?
Yeah

6. Last person you spoke to on the phone?
My friend with whom I have a standing weekly appointment to watch Battlestar Galactica on Sunday nights. I was calling to let him know I was good to go this weekend.

7. Do you like the person who tagged you?
I wasn’t tagged

8. How old are you today?
Will Truman is officially 32 years old, though he’s only had eight birthdays.

9. What is your favorite sport to watch?
College Football.

10. What is your favorite drink?
Mountain Dew

11. Have you ever dyed your hair?
I dyed it gray for a costume once. I also dyed it darker brown once to match my beard, which I also dyed in order to see if it would make my beard look a little more full to avoid having to shave it for a job interview. Didn’t work.

12. Last time you hugged your child?
N/A

13. Favorite food?
Enchiladas

14. What was the last movie you watched?
Iron Man

15. Favorite day of the year?
New Year’s Day

16. How do you vent anger?
Writing helps with that.

17. What was your favorite toy as a child?
Can’t remember. Would a TV count?

18. What is your favorite season?
Winter, unless I’m living up north.

19. Ocean or pool?
Ocean.

20. Cherries or Blueberries?
Those are two of my least favorite berries. No preference.

21. Do you want your family & friends to participate?
No one in my family knows I do this. Few realtime friends do, either. Blogfriends can if they’d like to.

22. Who is the most likely to respond?
Barry and Logtar seem to like memes.

24. Living arrangements?
Live with my wife, though she’s currently spending most of her time in another state.

25. When was the last time you cried?
When I found out that my father-in-law likely had pancreatic cancer.

26. What is on the floor of your closet?
Miscellany that I don’t have room for elsewhere. Lots of shoes and boots.

27. Who is the family or friend you have known the longest that you are tagging?
No taggie anybody. Barry is the oldest reader I have that still reads regularly, I think.

28. What did you do last night?
Watched Lost with crappy reception on my TV cause I didn’t buy the theater tickets early enough.

29. Hawaii or Florida?
Florida. At least then I can drive somewhere cooler if I want to.

30. What inspires you?
I’m not easily inspired.

31. What are you most afraid of?
Waking up someday and finding out that I’ve been living someone else’s life.

32. Plain, cheese or spicy hamburgers?
Spicy with cheese.

33. Favorite dog breed?
Mutts. I don’t like purebreeds. Smaller dogs, generally. With hair. If Clancy and I live in the country, though, larger dogs may make more sense.

34. Favorite day of the week?
Saturday. Is there any other answer?

35 How many states have you lived in?
Four Trumanverse states, soon to be five. Six if you count the state I was born in, though as soon as I left the hospital we went back to the state where my family was living at the time.

36 Do you like these questionnaires?
Sometimes.

37. What kind of car did your very first date drive?
I can’t for the life of me recall. I want to say a silver Toyota, but that’s what my wife drives, which means I’m probably transposing.

38. What is the last book you read?
The last book I completed was Stephen White’s Dead Time. I’m currently wading through Homicide by David Simon and Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano.

39. What are your hobbies?
Computer stuff. Writing. Collecting things.

40. Can you still make the Hula Hoop stay around your waist?
Never could, really.

Not wholly unexpected this time with all the previous talk about sex, but my blog is apparently back in NC-17 territory. So the banner up top has been changed back to the NC-17 one to celebrate. If you still see the coffee mug, click Refresh.

OnePlusYou Quizzes and Widgets

Capella has a post on what she looks for in a man. I’ve got some thoughts on such lists, but I want to mull it over before writing anything more extensive about it. Reading over the first bullet point, which is a thirst for intelligence, the thought occurred to me: There’s got to be a dating service that focuses on people with high IQs. It’s not always easy for these people to meet each other and a relationship with too high an intelligence differential can be problematic. Plus, people with more intelligence often have money. Not super amounts, but perhaps enough to fund a dating service.

Turns out that there is something called IQ Cuties. Obviously I’m not in a position to check out how worthwhile it is. I think that such a service would be better off the internet. I once enrolled in a specialty dating service a while back and got fleeced pretty good. It was of a religious nature. I probably would have been better off going to church. In any case, it’s a lot easier to get sums of money out of people (like me) when you’re brick-and-mortar-plus-Internet rather than potentially some fly-by-night Internet operation.

The specialty operation that I enrolled in went out of business shortly after my term expired. So maybe Lavalife is the way to go, business-wise.

Has anyone seen those ads for Chemistry.com that rib on eHarmony? The gay ones I understand, but I didn’t quite understand why “We accept everybody!” is a great selling point for a dating service. I signed up with the aforementioned fleecing agency in part because they did cull the herd, so to speak. Then again, they were probably rejecting people that were more up my alley than the ones I actually dated (except one who was absolutely marvelous though of course I failed to recognize that at the time), so maybe that’s where Chemistry.com would have come in. But while I wouldn’t refuse to date someone that was rejected by eHarmony, I don’t know that I’d jump in the pool with a bunch of rejects. I did that enough in junior high, thankyouverymuch.

A while back Unfogged clued me in to something called CrazyBlindDate, where basically you set something up on short notice and in stark contrast to the aforementioned dating services is indiscriminate in nature. Even though it’s completely out of my nature, I might have done something like this when I was single. It’s sort of like the old apartment complex I lived in out in Deseret. It was $300 a month with all bills paid, filled with ex-cons and miscreants, and the most interesting place one could ever ask to live for a little while. Particularly when you’re writing a blog, as I was at the time. CrazyBlindDate probably provides excellent blogfodder.

I’m going to try something this week and see how it goes. Because of a trip last weekend to my folks house, I was reminded of various politics-related things that had been bumping around in my mind that I wasn’t sure whether to post on HC. None of them are really policy-related (except one involving condominium constructions), but they do involve Republicans and Democrats. As y’all know, I’m a bit sensitive (maybe hypersensitive) about this becoming a too charged a political atmosphere, so I ask that we refrain about making blanket statements about Republicans and Democrats.

I meant to thank Brandon Berg for helping me out with the site. Up until recently, the site did not appear correctly on Internet Explorer. Brandon discovered that the problem, which was over-extended margins. Rather than being something that IE was doing wrong, it turned out that it was something that Firefox was compensating for. I noticed the same thing on a web site of my father’s. He was missing a </td> in there somewhere and Firefox was somehow able to correct for it. Unfortunately, such corrections have made me continually forget that there was something wrong and thus fail to correct it.

Because I comment on a lot of more contentious blogs than this one, I pull in readers who follow the links. I’m very happy that they stop by. However, since this site is different in form and substance from the other sites, I feel the need to express what this site is and what it isn’t and what I want it to be and don’t want it to be. There are all sorts of websites out there where one can express their views on the hot political topics of the day, but that’s not what I’m aiming to do here.

First and foremost, Hit Coffee is not a site for spiteful or contentious social commentary. It is a place where I jot down things that happen in my day-to-day life, thoughts about things that happen in my life, and thoughts on what’s going on in the world around us. The comment section is for people that want to share their thoughts and experiences as they relate to what I’m talking about. I want it to be a place where liberals and conservatives, whites and minorities, believers and non-believers, and Americans and non-Americans can feel comfortable. Unfortunately, that sometimes means that I have to put in place certain guidelines. Not just “everybody be nice” guidelines, but guidelines around what is and is not discussed around here. Some issues must be discussed with affirmative kindness, as Bob has put it, but some unfortunately raise our collective blood pressure so high so quickly that I try to steer clear of in general.

As of right now, those issues are: human biodiversity, immigration policy, George W. Bush, politicians attempting to replace George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, anthropological global warming science, and race politics.

For the most part I practice what I preach and I steer clear of these areas. When I do bring them up, I try to do so in a relatively apolitical manner and try (not always successfully) to kick dirt over my own views. If I mention my political views, it’s only to provide context and more in the tone of disclosure than advocacy. If I take a stance on an issue that could be considered political (copyright law, medical malpractice tort, etc) I try to focus more on the effects that the policy or policies have in the world as I see it. When I do this, I will generally provide more latitude in the comment section.

To some extent, gross generalizations are a function of life. It’s pointless to try to avoid it completely. What I would like to avoid is the painting of entire groups or people as “bad” or “evil”. I keep a particular eye on minorities, women, men, liberals, conservatives, feminists, Christians, Mormons, Muslims, atheists, southerners, immigrants (legal or illegal), or Americans in general. Groups that I am not worried about offending are terrorists, America-haters (as in people that despite America, not those that are critical of specific actions that America has taken or aspects of its culture), racists (as in people that believe that minorities are generally worthy of contempt, not mean people that simply hold political views that minorities don’t like), misogynists (see previous disclaimer, replace “minorities” with “women” or “men”), members of the FLDS, and people supportive of those that are attacking Americans and/or our troops abroad. I’d likewise ask that people that disagree with other people refrain from comparing them to any of these groups.

You may be wondering “Gosh, should I be worried about saying anything that might be considered controversial?” Well thus far, if you’ve commented before, there is not a problem or if there has been I have said something about it. I’ve never banned a reader and I’m not sure if I’ve actually deleted any comment that is not my own. I’ve clipped some, but usually having more to do with the accidental slippage of information about me than about anything inappropriate. At this point, the most action I usually take will be to shut down a conversation if I think it’s veering into uncomfortable waters. The long and short of it is that I don’t want to have to worry about who is saying what about whom whenever I’m away from the comment section for a while.

Thus far I haven’t. Thus far I have loved my commentariat. Every last one of you. I don’t want to do anything to discourage you from throwing in your thoughts and perspectives and experiences. Without an active comment section and the conversations that occur here, I probably would have stopped doing this a long time ago. This stated policy is not an attempt to change anything around here. Rather, it’s an attempt to keep this place as genial and open as it has always been.

Comments that veer off-topic are fine so long as they don’t run afoul of anything above. Comments that belong on one message but are accidentally posted onto another message will be relocated. If I ever get the point that I shut down a thread through WordPress, any comments placed on other posts to circumvent the thread-kill will be deleted.

As a courtesy to Hit Coffee readers, I will sometimes clean up someone’s post. I don’t modify content (except as where mentioned above), but if someone posts an HTTP I will replace it with a link. If someone double-posts, I will delete the first post.

Comments containing more than two links (whether typed out or HREFed) are automatically sent to moderation. I will clear them as soon as I can.

Blockquotes are discouraged in comments for technical reasons. If you are quoting something someone else wrote for reference, use Italics.

Comments that are cross-posted are fine, though I’d ask that you mention that you did so.