Hu's on first (I got a version of this by email and found a copy on the 'net to link to.)

I'm don't really recall how I got there... but I was reading a thread on wineaccess.com (ex-ArsDigita client) Best $100 Bottle of Wine and somebody suggested "20 bottles of thunderbird for me doc....and some pepto bismol to go with it" and the thunderbird theme continues in later posts. (Yes, I know that "ex-ArsDigita client" is redundant.)

Was the moon landing a hoax? (Flash). Found in a discussion of a slashdot story, "NASA Wasting Time and Money on Moon Landing Doubters".

I received a summons for jury duty. I'm trying to figure out how to avoid it. This site might help. Some highlights:

• A prospective juror in a Dallas District Court was surprised by the definition of voluntary manslaughter given the panel: "An intentional killing that occurs while the defendant is under the immediate influence of sudden passion arising from an adequate cause, such as when a spouse's mate is found in a compromising position." "See, I have a problem with that passion business," responded the jury candidate. "During my first marriage, I came in and found my husband in bed with my neighbor. All I did was divorce him. I had no idea that I could have shot him." She wasn't selected for the jury.
• The last time I served on jury duty, the judge in Martinez, CA told the 100 perspective jurors, "...and I don't want to hear any O.J. Simpson the jury system doesn't work excuses. If O.J. was in my court he would have been guilty as hell!
• A woman brought her boss along, who said that he was a building contractor, that his business could not operate without the woman, and that if the woman reported for jury duty she would be fired from her job. The judge ordered the woman to report for jury service the next week, and ordered her boss to do his jury service upon his employee's completion of her jury service, and that if he fired the woman he would be held in criminal contempt of the court.

Whoa. In 1994, we had Thanksgiving dinner with friends who deep fried the turkey. Underwriters laboratories thinks this is a bad idea and there's a movie to show you why.

DougDay - "Every Doug has his day."

It really is possible to gain useful knowledge on slashdot. In the article "Mac OS X to Get Journaling FS", one reader explains how journaling file systems work with a nice analogy that involves a librarian falling out of a window.

There also a tangential discussion comparing features of linux vs. OS X which includes the line "Damn that apple and their embracing of open standards."

All this has me seriously thinking about getting a mac. We bought a video camera this weekend and iMovie seems like it'd be a nice way to share some movies of Marney.

Senate Panel Votes to Give D.C. Full Voting Rights in Congress (washingtonpost.com)... no, it won't get any further than committee approval.

Supporters of the measure note that the District is the only jurisdiction where U.S. residents who pay federal taxes and serve in the military have no vote in Congress. The District, with 572,059 residents, ranks second among the states in per-capita federal income taxes paid, and it suffered more casualties than did several states in 20th-century wars, from World War I through Vietnam.

And still "Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) restated his flat opposition to the measure". Please, somebody, explain to me again how an allegedly patriotic American like Lott can oppose the basic right of congressional representation.

I've found a new pastime to try, Letterboxing. From the FAQ:

Here's the basic idea: Someone hides a waterproof box somewhere (in a beautiful, interesting, or remote location) containing at least a logbook and a carved rubber stamp. The hider then usually writes directions to the box, which can be straightforward, cryptic, or any degree in between. Selecting a location and writing the clues is one aspect of the art.

Once the clues are written, hunters attempt to find the box. In addition to the clue and any maps or tools needed to solve it, the hunter should carry at least a pencil, his personal rubber stamp, an inkpad, and his personal logbook. When the hunter successfully deciphers the clue and finds the box, he stamps the logbook in the box with his personal stamp, and stamps his personal logbook with the box's stamp. The box's logbook keeps a record of all its visitors, and the hunters keep a record of all the boxes they have found, in their personal logbooks.

It's appealing to me because it's a goal-oriented (yet still basically pointless), it's a nice weekend outing with my wife and daughter, and it's a modest way to get a little more exercise.

My big beef with the site is that there's no entry for District of Columbia on the directory of clues. Repeat after me:

Washington, DC is not part of Maryland.
Washington, DC is not part of Maryland.
Washington, DC is not part of Maryland.
Washington, DC is not part of Maryland.
Washington, DC is not part of Maryland.

On a UI note, the Letterboxing North America web site has one of the most creative uses I've seen of image map navigation, particularly the page about their mailing list.

Dolly Parton was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition this morning about her new album. NPR's site has more info and some great quotes like Parton's comment on Whitney Houston's success with Parton's "I Will Always Love You"

I will always appreciate her -- I made a lot of money, and I need a lot of money, because it costs a lot of money to look this cheap.

But the best part is that she covers "Stairway to Heaven" (Real Audio) on her new album and it's not that bad.

Following a story on slashdot about "L33T" Speak Invades Schools, some slashdot readers got into a discussion of the proper way to translate the Lord's Prayer into "L33T" Speak.

Proof that I'm a unix weenie. I've got a bunch of lines in a web server log file that look like this:

[19/Sep/2002:20:07:50][19141.88][-sched:31-] Notice: ep_email_alerts (1): finished processing user alerts for 20 of 452 total users in 00:07:19 (21.00 sec/user)

I want to know the average "sec/user" value for all of these lines and I do this with one command line:

% grep sec/user gateway108-error.log | awk -F\( '{print $3;}' | awk -F. 'BEGIN {count = 0; sum = 0;} {sum = sum + $1; count = count+1;} END { printf("count = %d\nsum = %d\navg = %.2f\n",count,sum,(sum*1.0)/count);}'

I didn't say it was a simple command line. Here's what the output looks like:

count = 115
sum = 2229
avg = 19.38

So there.