Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I found this one while looking for the clip from the Dell commercial. I’ve never seen it on TV, but that doesn’t alter the fact that it features more Devo. How can you go wrong with that?

It would be so easy to complain about all the commercials I don’t like. In fact, it might be an endless task.

But once in a while a commercial comes along that stands out from the crowd and I just have to enjoy for whatever reason. This is one. Never mind that it really has little to do about laptop computers. The idea of putting a big V8 engine into one is just silly. But silly is what makes this one fun. That and the hot techno-babes with wrenches and music by Devo.

And watch closely, it has just the right amount of cowbell!

The Grinch hated Christmas!

The whole Christmas season!

Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.

It could be that his head wasn’t screwed on quite right.

It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.

But I think that the most likely reason of all

May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

Perhaps it was because he was sick of being inundated by commercials with a Christmas theme starting before Halloween? Continue Reading…

I’ve been struggling with this problem for two months now and gotten nowhere, so I guess I’ll rant about it here. Who knows, maybe someone will read it who can help, but mostly, I’ll just get it off my chest.

I run a web site for our local ski club at the Buffalo Freenet. It’s been there for a couple years now. For those of you not familiar with the BFN, it’s a non-profit, public service sponsored by the Department of Library and Information Services at the University of Buffalo. It began years ago as a service to the community to let people get online back before internet service was commonplace as it is now.

It started out in the days of phone modems and text-based services. I had an account there years ago and used to wait my turn to log in on one of the two phone numbers they had. My first (I mean very first!) web page was hosted there. I remember getting an account at Delphi (The ISP, not the auto parts company I worked for. It was before Delphi Automotive even existed.) because they offered PPP service that you needed to use a web browser before Compuserve or others did. AOL didn’t exist or may have just started up out of the remains of the Commodore-centric Quantum-Link service. Continue Reading…